On the north bank of Fuxian Lake in Chengjiang, Yunnan, there is a hill of 18 square kilometers, named Maotian Mountain because it looks like a straw hat.
This is the location of the first place of Chengjiang biota, which is hailed by the international scientific community as a "world-class fossil treasure house".
Many people know that the ancestors of human beings are apes, so what happened before?
Hundreds of millions of years ago, what was the ancestor of human beings?
The answer is - fish.
As the earliest vertebrate discovered so far on the earth, the Kunming fish that lived in Chengjiang was the ancestor of human beings 518 million years ago.
The Fengjiao Kunming fish discovered in 1999 is only about 3 centimeters long, but the differentiation of head, trunk and post-anal tail has appeared, and it has the basic body configuration of vertebrates.
Its appearance pushed forward the earliest fossil records of vertebrates by 50 million years, and became the "No. 1 fish in the world" that caused a sensation in the world.
In July 2012, the Chengjiang Fossil Land was successfully applied for world heritage, becoming the first fossil world natural heritage in China, the only in Asia, and only three in the world.
At present, in the Chengjiang Fossil Field, a total of Cambrian rare animal and plant fossils belonging to 20 categories and more than 280 species have been found, and 80% of them belong to new species.
Not just vertebrates, but the ancestors of almost all living animal phyla can be found here.
And in the following 500 million years, they spread out, forming the appearance of today's biodiversity on the earth.
(Du Xiaoxiao Yuan Hongkai Yao Hong)
Responsible editor: [Luo Pan]